Five free design tools for small businesses

Creating great designs for your business cards, website and social media profiles may seem costly, but it needn't be. There are lots of free online tools that allow you to create designs that even the pros would be proud of! Here are five of our favourites.

1. Canva

We're big fans of this service at Enterprise Nation HQ. It allows you to create eye catching social profile headers, presentations, business cards, social media posts, leaflets and much more for absolutely nothing. Select the type of design you want and choose from hundreds of free images and graphics or upload your own. Here's an example of what you can do:

2. Piktochart

Everyone loves a good infographic and Piktochart allows to create one for free. Choose from 400 templates, icons and graphics to turn statistics into visually stimulating digital works of art! Infographics are a brilliant way to present data in an engaging way, and a great thing to share through social media.

3. Unsplash

High quality photography can be costly, but not with Unsplash. This site offers hundreds of free, high-resolution images to do whatever you want with! Covering categories including food and drink, technology and architecture the site provides powerful photos to use in your marketing without the need to register or log in.

4. Gimpshop

This website bills itself as the free alternative to Photoshop, the much loved, but expensive, image editing tool. Use Gimpshop's impressive range of features to manipulate and fix photos.

5. Pablo

This simple site does one thing but it does it brilliantly. From the team behind Buffer, a great service for scheduling social media posts, Pablo lets you design engaging images in 30 seconds (like the one below). Upload an image or choose from a selection, adjust the background and fiddle with the contrast, add some text and a logo and bingo, you've got an image that could be shared thousands of times on Twitter.

This post is published in association with MOO, one of the world's fastest growing online print and design businesses. Get inspiration for your business cards, flyers, notecards and more here.